Moses Isegawa - Abyssinian Chronicles

Rising out of the bowl and swelling northward was Nakasero Hill. Lashed by asphalt and boxlike buildings, this was the home of wholesalers and retailers fighting to prosper in the doomed air of commercial asphyxiation. The cubbyhole shops were grouped like a bunch of cargo containers vomited by a shipwreck, pounded by the iron sun, harassed by poison rain and eroded from the inside by the semi-volitional mode of disintegration favored by stranded pirates. On a higher terrace, overlooking the shops, were the High Court, a bunch of lesser courts and a police station, arranged in pompous, tree-lined lanes dotted with the residences of army officers, whose jeeps farted onto the windows and the file cabinets of these overseers of justice. The majestic tension from this hill seemed to seep into the bowl. I would stand on the rim and try to listen for brewing earthquakes.

For the moment, though, I would hear only the crazed cries of the van boys, the raspy whispers of toothless fortune-tellers and the monotonous chants of snake charmers. Finally, my attention would be drawn away by the needle-sharp call of the muezzin, the iron wail of sirens or the roar of army jeeps headed for Nakasero Hill. Overpowering the fading sirens would be the indomitable crack of the fault lines on which these hills stood in their self-important configurations. I would will them to shift and bury the hills, overturn the valleys and kick up a monstrous mushroom cloud. I wanted Serenity, Padlock and their current dictatorship, whose caustic fumes had brought me here, to go the way of the animals which used to roam these valleys.

By their own standards, the two dictators had done well. They had moved from the rural obscurity of Serenity’s village house to the red-roofed pretension of a big Indian bungalow. The front windows were covered in wire net because Indians lived in mortal fear of burglary. The front door, which was rarely used, stood on top of twelve wide steps that lent the edifice the look of a dismal pagoda.

The living room was cluttered with sofas, baby things and other objects which made the air prickly with the dust that nestled on them like ticks on a cow. It was not hard to see that the house had contracted, pressured as it was by the number of people occupying it, by the inevitable expansion of a very Catholic family.

The open backyard formed part of an extended yard, which compressed lives, histories and religions into the shared burden of structural intimacy. I was gripped by the sensation that it was a prison of sorts, with too many regulations and too many pretensions exacerbated by a dictatorial administration that believed in incarceration as a superior form of discipline and upbringing.

For Serenity, living here was a form of upward mobility, because these were formerly segregated areas. In those days this part of Kampala was called Mini Bombay. Serenity had, for some time, luxuriated in his dream of having three children and saving money to buy himself a car and all the other trappings of a secure life, but his dream had been hijacked by the hydra of Catholicism, which he had first met in his wife’s parental home. The tortures of the crucified Christ on his inlaws’ wall, now safely preserved from the vagaries of a leaking roof, had entered his life. Hydra breath had scorched the thin veneer of his dream, and he was now on his way to having as many children as the Indian civil servant he had replaced in this pagoda. He now had six children, courtesy of twin births, and his head was awash with worries. A man bewildered by the speed at which things had careened out of control, he both feared the future and mistrusted the present.

Serenity preferred to delegate power to his enforcer, Padlock, and shield himself from drab domestic work. He was a man who loved to do things by remote control, as though he were conserving his energy for a holy task. Normally, he preferred not to know what his enforcer did in order to keep his dictatorship going. At the back of his mind he held the notion that his enforcer deserved as much trouble as she got for having insisted on breeding so many children. He kept thinking about a magic escape route out of his current predicament, but he felt too proud to give up and walk away. He was rational enough to remember that it took two to have a big family. He kept trying to trace where and when he had lost control and let Padlock win. It dawned on him that Padlock had waged a very determined campaign, rejecting any form of compromise or discussion. The pressures of adjusting to the city had played into her hands, and before he realized it, he had lost both the contraception battle and the war. The result was his trademark wrinkled forehead, which lent him a scowling, comical look — a look fit for a tormented despot.

Padlock was a changed woman. She had become more confident and assertive because she no longer had to look over her shoulder when enforcing rules in her house. Her mien demanded respect while bearing not a trace of apology. The draconian disciplinarian in her had fully emerged and was grounded in her new status by a new ritual: Padlock had to be greeted on bended knee by all her children. Early every morning, I had to slip into her bedroom, which she shared with Serenity, go down on my knees and mouth a greeting. The alternative was to go out and look for her in the courtyard, where she always seemed to be, press my knees on the chipped cement and speak the loathsome greeting. The thought of calling this woman “mother” made me sick. It made me want to throw up on her feet. Her insistence on making me lie every day by calling her something I never believed in introduced me to fiction and to the delusions of power. It also intensified our clashes.

Looking down at the squirrel grovelling at her sandaled feet, she would or would not return the proffered greeting. Her internal system was wont to reject my offering, which meant that I had to try again till I got it right. Meanwhile, she would be towering in the morning air, her hair looking like a tea cozy.

“I didn’t hear you,” she would say, looking above as though asking for heavenly intervention.

To a man bursting with impatience to get off his knees and elude the pitying looks hurled by passing strangers, her manner was maddening. It was not that her ears were faulty; no, she had actually heard the greeting, but her dictatorial sensibilities had not been appeased by my tone of voice. The right tone had to embody total acknowledgment of her power, servile gratitude for every little thing she had ever done for you, and unequivocal submission to her will. The right tone of voice got you a reply and permission to stand up. All this was easy for my brothers and sisters, raised in the city, but for me, the free-spirited villager who had never knelt for anybody and who had been knelt to by quite a few grateful mothers, this status was hard to accept. It cost Padlock a number of guava switches to beat me into submission.

I particularly resented this courtyard worship because I did not want to be seen on my knees by our neighbor’s third and youngest wife. Knowing that her eyes were on me made me feel like a little helpless bird, beak up and open, tongue quivering, waiting for mother bird to drop a worm down the throat. From the very beginning I saw Sauya Lusanani, the wife in question, as a combination of sister and lover and as the embodiment of the spirit of the city. I convinced myself that, with her in my camp, my plans for revenge would succeed. She was the youngest adult around with whom I could associate, and my present predicament made me want to know her more urgently. Until that could happen, I lived in torment. She was a Muslim, and there was the chance that she would reject me because I was a Catholic. In my desperation I convinced myself that I would convert if that was the only way to get her. I wrestled with the question of circumcision: Was there a way I could convert without getting circumcised? How could I allow myself to be circumcised when there was the possibility of penile cancer? Had I learned nothing from Dr. Ssali’s ordeal? I was sure that Padlock would disown me and influence Serenity to stop paying for my education. How, then, would I become a lawyer?